ok, maybe it wasn't my fault
Wednesday, November 04, 2020
Yesterday, in a self-pitying post, I blamed myself for how fucked up this country is. This morning, writing in advance of any final vote tallies but with the sense that Biden will be the next President and the Senate will remain Republican, I see where the real blame lies.
It depresses me that this quote is still relevant, almost 50 years after Hunter S. Thompson wrote it. I'd love to get to the point when it was no longer timely to post this, which I have done many times over the years. I don't think I'll live that long.
“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
As I write this, while he is trailing in the actual vote count with 86% of votes counted, Trump has received more than 66 million votes. That's 66 million Americans and counting who think we need four more years of this man. Those aren't people who looked at our country in 2016 and thought the businessman was the right choice to make our country great again. No, these are people with four years of evidence of how the businessman runs the country, and they said yep, that's what I want.
I love the quote, and I love how we can use it toward two rationalizations: Either we just couldn't bring ourselves to face ourselves; moral reckonings are never comfortable. OR we faced ourselves, and didn't much mind what we saw. We hope it's the first. But we know it's the second.
Posted by: Tomás | Wednesday, November 04, 2020 at 01:56 PM
Ironically, my father was a used car salesman.
Posted by: Steven Rubio | Wednesday, November 04, 2020 at 02:07 PM